Editing EVE Online (section)

==Player Factions==
The real action is between player organizations.  The basic building block of organization in EVE is the Corporation.  The corp is equivalent to the guild or clan of most MMO's, with a member list, some super users, guild bank and assets, etc.  However, corps can have more assets, such as deployable space equipment that remains on the server indefinitely (as long as the bills are paid, resources are supplied, and nobody blows it away).  The typical corporation has a few dozen to a few hundred members, although holding corps tend to be very small and actively recruiting player corps can range into the thousands of members.

Corporations can band together formally into alliances.  Corporations in an alliance can make sovereignty claims over systems by deploying and maintaining a thing in space that says they have sovereignty.  Having sovereignty over a system allows deployment of system upgrades that can make the system more ideal for the owner's intended use.  The typical alliance has thousands of members, with the largest breaking into tens of thousands.  

Alliances often informally band together into coalitions, usually consisting of a central power with satellite allies.  Coalitions aren't precisely modeled in the game, they're more of a meta feature, although alliances can set standings towards each other so their pilots see other pilots as friendly or hostile.  The major hallmarks of a coalition are having a unified command and communications so that all coalition members can cooperate both at the battle and campaign level of operations.  From a practical standpoint this usually means a shared discord or mumble with single sign on (CCP Games helpfully provides a gigantic api that includes an auth token system), and private web site (forum, wiki) for coalition coordination.

An actual list of player coalitions in the game would be impossible to maintain as they change frequently and often without warning.  However, as a general rule of thumb there are always multiple predominately American coalitions that hate each other, and one Russian coalition that hates everyone who isn't Russian.

CCP has a very interesting approach to PvP, in the sense that they are relatively hands-off apart from actually cheating through the use of in-game hacks. Defrauding other players? Totally allowed. Betraying your allies? Happens all the time. Embezzling funds from your alliance? Played a key role in one of EVE's biggest wars to date. This shifts the meta where out-of-game interactions, intelligence & counter-intelligence operations, propaganda campaigns, and backroom deals have a huge effect of how the game is played. And the best part is that CCP actively ''canonizes'' it. Major player battles are commemorated through wreckages and monuments, and adaptations like ''EVE: True Stories'' recount them more or less exactly as they played out, with all the major players portrayed as their in-game characters. As players often like to say, "EVE is real."